.I want to talk about the "transcendental ego". Just to be sure I'm straight, on what you mean, "it's" not anything we can actually "know"; rather, "it's" the means by which we would otherwise "know" nothing
The transcendental ego defies easy conceptualization because it is not easily accessible as a working idea. It rebels. Of course, it is in modern discussions grounded in Kant (Plato's stepchild?). I followed Husserl in his Meditations and especially like Sartre's Transcendence of the Ego. If one takes the Cartesian/Husserlian route, then it reconfigures the epistemological center of gravity. It is no longer the big time space continuum in which discrete and localized events occur. These events belong to science and science is produced out of the originary structures of cognition. Here is the Copernican revolution; and human consciousness becomes the center of the universe, which is why I say there is no world, only worlds: What I mean by this is that empirical worlds and their conditions of problem solving (which is what a world is) are not the same.
But your question goes to transcendence. First, there is no denying transcendence. The objects before me are not language and language is the very seat of intelligibility. Through my freedom i acknowledge that there is something about the world that is beyond the concept I use to denote and define. This is the Being of the world (again, very cryptic stuff and requires, to be taken seriously, an open mind to theory. It is very serious philosophy and massively interesting. I think you are well aware of this.)The question then is this: Since I posit that the acknowledgement of Being-as-such is a transcendental knowledge (yes, duly subsumed by my synthetic cognition; but the boundaries imposed by the limits of a system of apriori structures of meaning-making do not presuppose limits on intuition. We are truly, I hold, intuitively free in our receptivity to intuited events and the world of intuited events is not constrained by logic. We are not free, agreeing with Kant, to abandon reason unless reason tells us so. If there is, in the words of someone I forgot, something better than reason, reason would tell us, but for now it is the only wheel that rolls) and not just an application of a universal, and since the perception of an object possesses nothin ont he objective end that would "give" one an acknowledgment of transcendence, then it is within the radical subjectivity that transcendence is to found. It's like falling in love: I see her face, I think about her all the time,and so forth. But it is not in these that love, the joy, the walking on air, is found. Rather, this happiness arises as an awakened dormancy within as something I had all along which needed a catalyst. (Hence,we can see what Martin Buber was about with his emphasis on the Thou: through the other our latent powers come forward.) For me this thinking is definitive. It moves from the premise of transcendence embodied in the immanence of a perceptual act, to the transcendence of the radical subjective end of an intentional relationship.
Language can be such a hindrance because a word insists on assimilation. We are walking totalities, subsuming the world and its particulars, and when there comes along something that has nuance and doubt regarding the conceptual take over (a kind of rebellion: concepts are like dictators--they work to fit everything under one ruling authority) we do our best to make standard meanings work. For me, 'God's knowledge', 'prefect knowledge' and the like are nothing but trouble. They are attempts to bring what is transcendental in human experience to heel. Is the "experience" of transcendence 'divine' and are we therefore divinity manifested in a moment of consciousness? I don't dare say. I don't need that kind of conceptual trouble.I once posed the following question, to some Christian associates: "Are we not God's knowledge, of us"? By which, I meant that, unlike us, God has perfect knowledge, of the world. But, that surely means there is absolutely no distinction between God's "knowledge", of a given-thing, and the "thing", itself. It, therefore clearly follows that, lacking any possible distinction, two truly identical "states" must, in fact be one-and-the-same. Hence, we are God's knowledge, of us. (I further argued that our knowledge, as imperfect, could only be so, if there were a "perfect knowledge", upon which to be predicated).
I think you can discursively do this no less than you can do it with any intuition. Imagine if there were a consensus that transcendence is embodied in immanence (in the acknowledgement of Being-as-such)and that there simply was no issue about this, but only in the interpretation of it. we could put it in arguments freely, lay it down as a premise just as confidently as we do with a color or a sound. But there is no consensus on this, but there could be, I think, if we were conditioned to respect such existential matters (as much as we are in fact conditioned to eschew them).Even though we cannot give a discursive account of why a "transcendental ego" must have such "perfect knowledge", disavowing "it" can only lead to eventual madness. If we see the "world" as being constituted by the "transcendental ego's" intentionality, then engaging even mundane phenomena is to have a rapport, with the world. (And, our insatiable need for "rapport" is why, in the movie Cast Away, Tom Hanks drew a "face" on that damned volleyball)
.Yes; I did previously admit to being an atoms-and-the-void kind of guy. But, as you've basically said, "facts" are indistinguishable from our knowledge, of them. In which case, we simply cannot assert a "fact", independent of our knowledge, thereof. In terms of, at least "human" reality, epistemology is the ground of ontology. So, instead of seeing the world as mere "mechanized" phenomena, if we see it as the "intentionality", previously mentioned, we can impute "perfect knowledge" to the ground-of-reality
'Perfect knowledge'? Now,are you making a reference to the pragmatist's premise that truth is made, not discovered? If this is true, then of course the "perfection" of an idea rests with its pragmatics: Does it work? Beyond this there is nothing to say. One could say that in any nihilist position (a contestable remark, granted) such as this all propositions are equally perfect since there is no standard beyond the pragmatic contingency. But I am not so clear on other parts of this.
.I claimed that "[d]isavowing a "transcendental ego" can only lead to eventual madness". If we are, in any sense homo religiosus, it's in the compelling need to enjoy that "rapport", which only comes from being in the presence of another ego
You think this? This is what i think, only it is probably more true that madness follows on the heels of getting involved with transcendence rather than rejecting it. When we get closer to that threshold ineffability,we can lose grip on what keeps us sane. Peter Berger wrote in his "Sacred Canopy" that once these structures of plausibility are challenged, we are in no man's land.
Donne was right: "No man is an island". There are those who will doubtless argue that the "ground-of-reality" needed be "sentient". Others might even disavow the "ground-of-reality", altogether as the artifact of an exploded monotheism. But, it's not necessary to impose "ecclesiastical dogmas", on rational enquiry, in order to get the coveted "rapport". And, speaking of "rapport", maybe we should strip away it's unfortunate embellishments. I don't see it, so much as being an "emotional state"; rather, it really is the presence of another ego: no more, and no less. What if even more strident detractors denounced the "transcendental ego", as a farcical stunt to justify our "knowledge-claims"? I'd say they might as well go ahead, and denounce the individual "ego", as well. When you get right down to the nitty-gritty, the theater-in-your-head is about as credible as the "head", presumably containing the theater-of-the-world. (Let he, who doubts the "theater-in-his-own-head" denounce it, and afterwards reflect upon how it makes him feel).
Yeah, I agree with a lot of this. But I am of thinking that all of this is in the service of greater utility, to use a sterile term. This is another matter entirely, but here I'll just say that all philosophy has only one real priority: value. This is something I have not found in most of the literature that is not explicitly religious. It needs to be understood that Being Is value and that science has created an illusion of abstractions.